the nothing that changes everything
bitcoin has no intrinsic value. critics love that line. they repeat it like a mantra, hoping that if they say it enough times, the $100,000 price tag will simply vanish. and you know what? they are technically right. bitcoin is not a company that pays dividends. it is not a commodity you can burn for heat or wear as jewelry. it is an entry in a ledger. it is, in a physical sense, absolutely nothing.
but here is the secret they are missing: neither does the dollar in your pocket. neither does the digital balance in your bank account. neither does the promise you made to your children last night. gold isn't actually "useful" in the way we treat it—you can’t eat it, and its industrial use is a tiny fraction of its price. we built civilizations on these things not because of what they are, but because of what they enable.
money was never about the object. it was always about the agreement. the shell, the bead, the gold coin, the paper note—these were just the best technologies we had at the time for storing human coordination across time and space. money is the language we use to tell each other what we owe and what we are owed. when the language is clear, we build. when the language is corrupted, everything falls apart.
the value of bitcoin was never meant to be intrinsic. it is emergent. bitcoin doesn't promise you returns and it definitely doesn't have an issuer you can call when things go wrong. it doesn't ask for your trust. it offers rules instead. clear rules. public rules. rules written in the cold logic of mathematics rather than the shifting winds of policy. these are rules that don't change just because a central bank decides it needs to print more "nothing" to cover a mistake.
when people say "bitcoin has no intrinsic value," they are really just telling on themselves. they are showing that they don't understand what money has always been. money isn't a thing you own; money is a protocol for coordination. it is the social glue that allows eight billion people to work together without knowing each other's names. volatility isn't proof that the network is failing. it is the sound of a new global protocol being understood in real-time. it is the market trying to price a paradigm shift.
every crash is just a stress test. every recovery is proof that this "nothing" refuses to die. bitcoin has no intrinsic value, but neither does coordination. and yet—coordination built the pyramids. coordination landed us on the moon. coordination is the reason you have food on your table and a roof over your head. bitcoin is just the first time in history we have a coordination tool that nobody can break.
so don't worry about the "nothingness." focus on the everything it makes possible. coordination is everything. and for the first time, the rules are finally fair for everyone.
